“The ever-expanding fossil fuel industry is endangering billions of lives and irreversibly altering the climate system. Until now, there had been no global estimate of the number of people who live in close proximity to fossil fuel infrastructure. Our work together with BPL reveals the scale of the massive risks posed by fossil fuels throughout their lifespan. Coal, oil and gas projects are driving climate chaos, harming people and nature,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
“This report provides yet more evidence of the imperative for states and corporate actors to ’defossilize’ the global economy to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis on human rights. The age of fossil fuels must end now.”
Leading on research and global calculations, BPL mapped the scale of exposure to fossil fuel infrastructure, by overlaying data on the known locations of fossil fuel infrastructure sites with gridded population data, datasets that are indicators of critical ecosystems, data on global gridded daily emissions, and data on Indigenous Peoples’ land tenure. BPL’s findings are likely to underestimate the true global scales due to discrepancies in documentation of fossil fuel projects and limited census data across countries.
The report is also based on in-depth qualitative research conducted in partnership with Columbia Law School’s Smith Family Human Rights Clinic and consisting of interviews of more than 90 people, including directly affected individuals from artisanal fishing communities in Brazil (Guanabara Bay), Indigenous land defenders in Canada (Wet’suwet’en territory) and coastal communities in Senegal (Saloum Delta), academics, journalists, CSOs and government officials. It also uses open-source data and remote sensing to corroborate and visualize findings. These were complemented by the results and conclusions of Amnesty International’s past research and ongoing campaigns against oil and gas giants in Ecuador, Colombia and Nigeria.
Staggering magnitudes of at-risk population
At least 2 billion people live within 5km of more than 18,000 operating fossil fuel infrastructure sites distributed across 170 countries around the world. Of these, more than 520 million are estimated to be children and at least 463 million are living within 1km of the sites exposing them to much higher environmental and health risks.
Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately exposed, with over 16% of global fossil fuel infrastructure sited on Indigenous territories. At least 32% of the existing fossil fuel sites mapped out overlapped with one or more ‘critical ecosystems.’*
The fossil fuel industry continues to expand, with more than 3,500 fossil fuel infrastructure sites either proposed, in development, or under construction globally. BPL figures suggest that such expansion could put at least 135 million additional people at risk. Notably, the number of oil and gas projects is set to increase across all continents while the number of coal plants and mines is increasing mostly in China and India.
“Governments have pledged to phase out fossil fuels, but we now have clear evidence showing new fossil fuel projects continue to expand preferentially in our most critical ecosystems globally. This is a direct contradiction with stated climate goals,” said Ginni Braich, a Senior Data Scientist at BPL who led the paper underpinning the report’s global findings.
